Reporter's Notebook: Highlights from the World History Convention

What: World History: The Next Ten Years ... A Conference on Research, Teaching, and Graduate Education

Where: John Hancock Hotel and Conference Center, Boston

When: Friday - Sunday, March 12-14, 2004

As a way of introduction, I'm at this conference as a Ph.D. student at Northeastern University here in Boston , on the verge of finishing up a dissertation in World History, so this was a chance to schmooze and see what people think the state of the field is. The conference is supposed to be a sort of Irish wake for the World History Center at Northeastern, which put together the conference, with sponsorships from the World History association and the AHA. The center is closing due to a lack of institutional support, both from the university and from funding agencies (Northeastern itself had nothing to do with the conference). This lack of institutional support became one of the dominating themes of the conference.

Friday, March 12: Not much goes on, except for the reception. I'm in a textbook focus group in the afternoon. One thing that becomes evident at this conference over the weekend is just how driven the field is by textbooks and teacher training. The reception is the dream of the impoverished grad student- an open bar. I'm always hoping someone gets loaded and obnoxious at these things, but those events seem to be an urban legend.

Saturday, March 13: 8:00am- not a civilized time for a presentation. My panel starts and I'm first up, there is a steady trickle of people wandering in with coffee and pastry in hand. In spite of the sexy topic of imperialism, not many people are enthused enough to get up early enough to see an 8:00 panel, about 30 out of 200 people attending. Word is ours is the best attended of the three at the time. My discussion of the martial race policies in India in the late 1800's elicits a question on the current state of recruitment in the U.S. army (African-American, Hispanic and poor rural white kids). This is a theme of the conference- what is the relevance of historical issues to today's politics?

Afterwards, I grab my 3 rd cup of coffee and head to a talk on the job market for world historians. Essentially, the focus is on teaching, and preparing secondary schoolteachers for the AP courses. Robert Townsend from the AHA provides a handout that points out the growing field for teaching World History courses and suggests that hiring will increase and the market is actually better than it is for the current glut of U.S. and European historians being turned out. Unfortunately, while I have done some work on pedagogy, teacher training is not my main focus coming in to the field. I'm not sure what this means, but it probably isn't good. The major problems that people express in the Q&A is in defining the field (what is World History anyway?) and in getting faculty trained in national fields to recognize the potential of work done outside the box, so to speak.

The next session after lunch is on moving from regional history to world history. Very little of the session is actually about that. The consensus, such as it is, is that regional historians move into world history by luck and interest, rather than training. This seems to contradict the opinion that World History training is crucial to producing world historical work. One solution advanced is that young scholars should pretend to be regional or national specialists, and then come out after they get tenure. None of this seems to me to be especially productive as an overall strategy, as one of my colleagues testily points out to the panel.

Pat Manning, founder and director of the World History Center , (and in the interest of full disclosure, one of my dissertation readers) who uses the plenary address to assess the field. http://www.whc.neu.edu/NextTenYears/PLENARY.html Essentially, he's optimistic in the long term, as the realities of globalization press academia, but in the short term, inertia and politics hamper advances in the field. One of the more striking parts of the address is how bluntly critical it is of his university and department for the lack of support given to the WHC in spite of its accomplishments, considering some of his fellow faculty are present. Afterward the reception and dinner, a group of us gather at a bar on Boylston Street to commiserate about the conference so far, and agree the tone is not exactly the celebratory one it had been planned as. While everyone in every profession complains that they don't get the respect and money they deserve, the griping tone of the conference so far is rather remarkable.

Sunday, March 14: I roll in slightly late to the morning session on “World historians, education and politics.” This panel focuses on the problems of government demands, teacher training, and the realities of the classroom. The money quote is from Peter Gran, who rips into the religious right by starting with the quip “Pat Robertson might pass for a human being if he walked into a room,” but in a more serious vein points out the problems of political rhetoric which is increasingly nationalist and patriotic after 9/11, for the teaching of World History. Peter Gran's attitude is not surprising, considering he once told me he was disappointed he didn't make Daniel Pipes' blacklist. On a more practical level, Robert Mitchell's account of teaching in a minority-majority L.A. school district under the various state and federal mandates was an eye opener as to the practical effects of slogans like “No Child Left Behind” and “A Qualified Teacher in every Classroom.” Essentially it comes down to standardized testing and memorizing historical trivia for both students and teachers. Barbara Brown pointed out the loss of “the common” as part of the problem, as there are very few places where people are forced to interact, and the move to school privatization is a part of an isolating process.

I then went to see ‘the commies,' as we called them, to speak on imperialism and globalization. The first talk was on the connections between anti-imperialist thought and anti-globalization rhetoric, and the question of whether the latter is just an extension of the former. The next talk was on managing the global economy, which raises legitimate issues but also highlighted the difficulty in talking about ‘elites' and controlling organizations without sounding like there's tinfoil in your hat, especially as ‘conspiracy theory' seems to be the newest way to dismiss left-wing assumptions. The last talk, by Aviva Chomsky, did the best job of locating the ideas of the first two by discussing the unfortunate history of Columbia in a global context of Cold War, human rights, and globalization.

Charles Headrick, the lunch speaker, which is normally ignored at these things, actually raised salient points. First, most of the political talk about history centers on values. The Byrd amendment and the proposed Gregg amendment for teaching U.S. history and Western Civ draw on the idea of history as moral teacher. This is then used by Republicans to justify the current state of American political thought. Although the idea of thousands of years of western thought, or even world thought, resulting in Tom Delay is a frightening one, the values argument has traction that world history has not used. It was nice to see people made uncomfortable by this line of thought, and there was a surprising lack of disagreement. The make-pretend argument was advanced again, like at some point you rip your face off and say “Ha! I've taught your kids respect for other cultures and that the U.S. is not the center of the world!” and go running off laughing maniacally. When I thought about my own teaching, I realized the problem is a real one, but that without any real conscious thought I had put my own values into what I taught. Essentially I try to highlight the difficulties that people faced in making decisions with historical impact, and how what we take for granted morally today (Headrick used Allan Bloom's suttee problem as an example) is shaped by history, and in the interaction between peoples through war, slavery, trade, migration and innumerable other factors shaped our modern views of morality. Of course that didn't really process until well after lunch while I was sitting through a panel on teaching migration that wrapped up the conference. At least I made it home in time to watch the NCAA tournament selection show.